Finally, as offenders are sacrificed to gods in order to appease their wrath, so manslayers are in many cases killed in order to satisfy their victims’ craving for revenge. In the next chapter we shall see that the execution of blood-revenge largely falls under the heading of “human sacrifice for the dead.”
CHAPTER XX
BLOOD-REVENGE AND COMPENSATION—THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH
ACCORDING to early custom, a person who takes the life of another may himself be killed by the relatives of his victim, or some other member of his family, clan, or tribe may be killed in his stead.[1] The custom of blood-revenge is found among a host of existing savages and barbarians, and has long survived among many peoples who have reached a higher degree of culture.
[1] The collective responsibility usually involved in the blood-feud has been discussed supra, [p. 30 sqq.]
We meet with blood-revenge in the midst of Japanese civilisation, not as a mere fact, but as a legally permitted custom. The avenger had only to observe certain prescribed formalities and regulations: there was a regular official to whom he must announce his resolve, and he must fix the time within which he would carry it out. The way in which the enemy was killed was of no importance, except that, even in ancient times, the man who had recourse to assassination was reprehensible.[2] Among the Hebrews blood-revenge continued to exist during the periods of the Judges and Kings, and even later; under the Old Kingdom, says Wellhausen, “the administration of justice was at best but a scanty supplement to the practice of self-help.”[3] It is a rule among all the Arabs that whoever sheds the blood of a man owes blood on that account to the family of the slain person.[4] Says the Koran:—“O ye who believe! Retaliation is prescribed for you for the slain.”[5] In ancient Eran blood-revenge survived the establishment of tribunals.[6] There is evidence left of its prevalence in early times among the Aryan population of India, though no mention is made in the Sûtras of blood revenge as an existing custom.[7] Among the Greeks it was only in the post-Homeric age that it was given up as a fundamental principle, the avenger being transformed into an accuser.[8] In Gaul and Ireland, though justice was administered by Druids or Brehons, their judgments seem to have been merely awards founded upon a submission to arbitration, the injured person being at liberty to take the law into his own hands and redress himself.[9] In the preface to the Senchus Mór we read that retaliation prevailed in Erin before Patrick, and that Patrick brought forgiveness with him.[10] Among the clans of Scotland, as is well known, the blood-feud has existed up to quite modern times; in the Catholic period even the Church recognised its power by leaving the right hand of male children unchristened, that it might deal the more unhallowed and deadly a blow to the enemy.[11] In England it was at least theoretically possible down to the middle of the tenth century for a manslayer to elect to bear the feud of the kindred of the slain, instead of paying the wer;[12] and long after the Conquest we still meet with a law against the system of private revenge.[13] In Frisland, Lower Saxony, and parts of Switzerland, the blood-feud was practised as late as the sixteenth century.[14] In Italy it prevailed extensively, even among the upper classes, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[15] In Corsica,[16] Albania,[17] and Montenegro,[18] it exists even to this day.
[2] Rein, Japan, p. 326. Dautremer, ‘The Vendetta or Legal Revenge in Japan,’ in Trans. Asiatic Soc. Japan, xiii. 84 sq.
[3] Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel, p. 467.
[4] Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahábys, p. 85.
[5] Koran, ii. 173. Cf. ibid. xvii. 35.